The Other Guys

The Other Guys, AKA Michael Scott NYPD, is a pretty hilarious movie. It's basically Will Ferrell being Will Ferrell, with Mark Wahlberg along for the ride. Of course, this time Will Ferrell is an anal retentive accountant for the NYPD ("The safest job in the world. An accountant for law and order"). So his physical comedy doesn't show up until later, but his mouth runneth over in a very pedantic manner. He turns around an analogy Wahlberg was trying to make about how much he hated him ("If I was a lion, and you were a tuna, I'd swim out into the middle of the ocean just to eat you ... and then I'd bang your tuna girlfriend!" "Firstly, I'm assuming this takes place of the southwest coast of Africa ...") that's hysterical and probably off the cuff.

It's explained later why's he's so in control and pedantic (e.g. he listens to Big River Band to get pumped up). It doesn't really explain why Wahlberg's so angry, though it does give a reason for why he can dance so well and play the harp.

The movie starts with a ridiculous car chase starring Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, but they're soon put out of commission following a great slow-motion shot and preceding the world's quietest fist-fight.

It then follows Ferrell and Wahlberg as they follow a scaffolding violation into multi-billion dollar white-collar crimes. Their boss is a TLC-quoting Michael Keaton, who moonlights as the evening manager of a Bed, Bath & Beyond. Their coworkers make a school visit and advise the kids to avoid jail by trying very hard not to be black or Hispanic. Ferrell's wife is the smoking-hot Eva Mendes, with whom he passes sexual messages via her grandmother (eww). The movie can get weird like that. It finishes with a lot of charts and graphs during the credits which neatly explain the current market melt-down, and finally a hilarious outtake.

It's basically what would happen if Michael Scott worked on the NYPD. And brought Dwight along. There are really only two problems that I could find with it. The first is that it's mislabelled. It was billed as an action-comedy, but it's more of a comedy with a bit of action in it. There's not enough action to satisfy my cravings. Secondly, some of the humor is not to my taste. That's not to say it won't be funny for millions of other people, but I'm just not into the awkward humor. There's a lot of it in the movie, but it's packed with so much other stuff as well that I was kept laughing most of the time. Not as much as Evan, though. This might be his favourite movie of the year. The ride home was filled with as many lines as we could remember.

For me, it was a new-release rental, not a theatre movie. The lack of action and abundance of awkward humor just didn't do it for me. Of course, there are many people I'd tell to go see it in theatres. If you're a fan of Will Ferrel, go see it. If you like The Office or probably even 30 Rock, go see it (there's a small cameo of Tracy Morgan during a hilarious sequence where Ferrell and Wahlberg realize they've been bribed only after they're at the Knicks game ... and the Jersey Boys concert).

My favourite quotes include:

"Wow, the SEC! You''ve got the best accountants! Except for Enron ... and Bear Sterns ... Goldman-Sachs, AIG, Arthur Anderson ..."

(After walking out of Wahlberg's ex-girlfriend's ballet studio) "You can dance really well!" "Those are the moves you do, you know, to make fun of the queers when you were eight." "You learned to dance sarcastically?"

(After being blown backwards by an explosion, lying on the pavement, shouting) "I need an MRI, there's no way I don't have soft tissue damage. How do they just walk away normally from explosions in movies? There's no way the Millenium Falcon could have flown normally away from the exploding Death Star!" "Star Wars was factually accurate!"

Many, many others whose exact wording I can't remember but made us laugh like ... well, the audience of a Will Ferrell movie.